Twenty years after he wrote the original comic, Marv Wolfman revisits Crisis on Infinite Earths by retelling the story in prose. It's less a retelling, though, and more an alternate perspective or side story. The book is narrated in the first person by the Flash, Barry Allen (with the occasional third-person limited interlude from other characters, mostly to give a sense of scale), after his death. When the Flash runs so fast he freakin' disintegrates, he essentially becomes unstuck in time, bouncing back and forth through the events of the Crisis, mostly unseen but always seeing. The novel is his attempt to put together the big events that lead up to his death, at the same time trying to make contact with his wife, Iris.

The novel gives a lot of glimpses into parts of the Crisis we didn't see in the comics-- there's a lot more material on Lyla/Harbingers (one of my favorite characters!), for one-- while glossing over much of the other action. I don't know how well it would stand alone, but as a companion piece that doesn't retread the original, it actually works very well. Barry is a great viewpoint character, a reasonably ordinary fellow, just a police investigator doing the best he can in progressively more impossible circumstances. I found myself getting a little misty-eyed at the novel's conclusion. What an ending! I know Barry comes back to life during the Final Crisis; I find it hard to believe that it'll be worth undoing what a great death he received.

It's interesting to note that Wolfman has revisited the events of the Crisis three times-- in Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 (1999), in this novel (2005), and in "New Day, Final Destiny," his tale for the 1980s DC Retroactive: Superman issue (2011). In all three cases there's an association between the Crisis and the increased grimness of comics after 1985. In the Legends of the DCU issue, Earth-D, already a more joyous and optimistic world than Earth-One, is destroyed,* and in DC Retroactive, the pre-Crisis Superman receives a vision from Destiny of the Endless (actually Harbinger in disguise) of all the terrible things to come after the Crisis, like The Death of Superman, Knightfall, Identity Crisis, and Blackest Night.

In this novel, Superman at one point realizes that in order to combat the threat to the multiverse, the heroes are going to have to become more like the villains, and learn how to kill. The implication being, to me at least, that this determination became a defining aspect of the post-Crisis single universe. One wonders if Wolfman blames the grimness of superhero comic books-- which began around the time of the Crisis with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Longbow Hunters, et al.-- on himself in some way. One can kinda see it: a lot of that unnecessary grimness is born out of the requirements of "event"-based storytelling, and that model of storytelling was ushered in by Crisis on Infinite Earths and hasn't really gone away since. I guess what I'm asking is, does Marv Wolfman blame himself for Trinity War?

* The events of which are kinda alluded to in this novel-- the Flash mentions seeing Earth-D destroyed and describes its superheroes. He doesn't mention helping save its civilians, but the recounting is vague and brief enough that the stories could fit together.

Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman was an unusual book for me. Like I said in another thread, my eldest son wants to start getting into comic books so I picked this up. He really likes Batman and gets very upset at me for saying Batman is not a superhero-“He doesn’t even have super powers! He is rich and has a cool utility belt and some very nice vehicles but he is NOT a superhero.” I always tell him. Anyway this book was kind of difficult for me at times. The reading wasn’t but the characters were often unknown to me. This book was all about a lot of parallel universes. I was never into comic books as a child and didn’t know a lot of the background story. It did have a large (and good) role for Flash and I really appreciated that part in this book. Basically, there is a character called Monitor and his opposite Anti-Monitor (made of antimatter) and lots of heroes and villains that try to work together before all of the worlds perish (and the trillions of people with them) if Anti-Monitor succeeds. We read about various superheroes and their demise, like Super Woman. I did not even know who the Psycho Pirate was or a lot of the other heroes from different worlds that were there. Some of them seemed cool and all but I don’t know. It wasn’t my thing I guess. This book had Wonder Woman and others that I would have enjoyed reading about if they were talked about more I guess but didn’t. The best part for me was learning something about Flash, how he was a normal nerd scientist, how he became a speedster even though in his real life he took forever to do anything and how he negotiated through various parallel universes and his love and how he only thought of her and how he hated to see the worlds die. I could get into this book deeper but I was really checking it out for my son. There was also the use of the D word a few too many times for me and death that were not all that spectacular to me and I wasn’t too crushed at their deaths I guess. I mean, they are superheroes aren’t they? Superman even had his hands full, took a licking dealing with Anti-Monitor but I guess Super woman did what she needed to do so that part was cool I guess. Oh, another cool thing was how all the other heroes and villains all had respect for Superman. I always tell my son, “Superman is a REAL superhero! If you want to measure a hero, compare him to Superman. Ok, that’s enough about this book. It was an ok read I guess. It was 320 pages and I’d give it a 2 stars. If I know more about the characters I’d probably give it more stars but for me, it was a 2 stars out of 5. ( )